Indie MMO Illyriad becomes Develop Awards finalist

Indie strategy game, Illyriad, has been named a finalist in the Develop Awards for Online Innovation.

Illyriad has previously been applauded for its depth and richness, which mark it as distinct from the many browser city building and war games on the net, but this is the first major award for which the game has been considered.

Founder James Niesewand commented, “Working on Illyriad every day, the team are obviously aware of the levels on innovation in the game. The subtlety and range of strategies available to players are unique in browser strategy games, the quality of the lore has received a lot of praise, while invisibly, behind the scenes, there is a lot of cutting edge work on server-side technologies. But at heart we’re still a low-profile, Indie development team, so we don’t necessarily expect the world to notice what we’re doing. For this to be acknowledged by an award as prestigious as the Develop Awards, for our work to be considered alongside studios like IO or luminaries like Peter Molyneux, is wonderful. Everyone at Illyriad is honoured by the nomination.”

Illyriad’s development team continue to hone leading-edge, plug-in-free HTML5 innovations. At the front-end, our new world map illuminates both world continents in WebGL https://www.illyriad.co.uk/BrokenLands/Map, and at the back end our use of Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform allows thousands of concurrent players to interact on a single shard with realtime game state communication via websockets. Our first major content expansion, The Broken Lands, is due later in 2013.